alt Hacker NewsWhich of these workplace issues have you experienced throughout your professional career?
Bad Management: 63%
I don't think you can really ask whether people have seen 'bad management' without explaining exactly what that means. People, including me when I was a developer, often see 'bad management' as 'I don't agree with what I'm being told to do'. That's not necessarily bad management; far more often it's poor communication of the facts (although you could argue that's the bad management bit I guess.)
The things I used to think were bad management included hard deadlines, short term benefit projects that took on tech debt, not 'motivating' people by giving better raises, refusing promotions even though I thought someone was great, prioritising things that I didn't see the value in, etc. Those things maybe weren't bad management at all. I just didn't have the full facts.
This is the problem with surveys like this. Someone didn't get the raise they wanted, so they check the 'bad management' box for that tiny cathartic dopamine hit. It doesn't necessarily mean they've been badly managed.
Replies
> I just didn't have the full facts
Two things are true at the same time: that as an employee, you will always get a distilled picture of the wider reality from your manager (sometimes to help you focus, sometimes because they're forbidden to share it with you, sometimes because parts of it would damage morale and thus productivity), and that managerial competence is in the communication skills to achieve that focus and morale. Two different managers with different skill levels, each dealing with the same "full facts" reality, will deliver different results.
Related tangent: it's sad to see the decline of high school debate teams, there's probably no better early-life preparation for the management skillset. Competent managers persuade. They know who they're trying to persuade, what that person values, and frame the wider organizational reality in such a way that it will make sense and align their direct report.
The worst managers think their job is to tell you what to do and that your job is to do what they say.
Employees are very well capable of determining management is bad. It’s certainly not “I didn’t get a raise“.
I’m not sure this is very relevant to the point of that question, sorry. Perceiving bad management is its own event, and every belief could have faulty premises (e.g. incomplete information).
Re: checking the box for dopamine… you might need to check in with yourself about whether you’re a bad manager! I know nothing, but that’s a very bright orange flag lol
I bet if you asked managers, the percentage of those who cited "lazy, undisciplined programmers" would be even higher.
AI makes this a solved problem. It now has superhuman programming ability and will almost always carry the message to Garcia.